


Our Little Life is Rounded With a Sleep

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Quiet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 06:02:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2218509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is quiet, low-key Mystrade. Pensive. Ends with death, but not unhappy death in particular. Just--people die, you know? That's how it happens, I'm afraid.</p><p>The title is drawn from one of Prospero's great monologues in "The Tempest."</p><p>Our revels now are ended. These our actors,<br/>As I foretold you, were all spirits, and<br/>Are melted into air, into thin air:<br/>And like the baseless fabric of this vision,<br/>The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,<br/>The solemn temples, the great globe itself,<br/>Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,<br/>And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,<br/>Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff<br/>As dreams are made on; and our little life<br/>Is rounded with a sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Little Life is Rounded With a Sleep

They knew each other well, and understood each other with the standard complicated blend of adoration, annoyance, understanding, frustration, and patience. Lestrade didn’t like Brussel sprouts and was even known to whine and make faces if they appeared at the table, though Mycroft loved them. Mycroft was similarly sulky about lima beans, though Lestrade considered them the best of beans, both dried and fresh, and loved the big, mealy, potato-y beans the best of all. Lestrade loved coffee. Mycroft drank it as a diplomatic necessity, but by far preferred a classic cup of Assam tea…black, no milk or sugar, as he’d given both up among the endless sacrifices to his diet years before.

Mycroft was regular in his hours, when the job allowed, though he was capable of running like a turbocharged race car for days on end when emergencies arose. In spite of that, all else being equal he went to bed early, rose early, and was ready to begin his day by seven at the latest.

Lestrade? A night-owl, with a passion for seeing in the dawn and promptly falling asleep. He could run for days, too, but after the first twenty-four hours awake the strain showed, and everything about him advertised the increasing levels of exhaustion. By the end of a long case he gave every appearance of being on the very edge of catastrophic system failure in all respects, from his wardrobe to his health to his mental facility. Mycroft received him home on those occasions with mixed laughter and clucking, stripping him out of his clammy, limp clothes, shoving him into a shower, then drawing him out, only to push a salty, steaming cup of soup into his hands, making him drink it before tumbling his lover gently onto a mattress and chuckling as the man crashed into unconsciousness without pausing to pull up the blankets. Mycroft took care of that for him.

They were both pitiful, whiny, needy monsters when sick or injured—almost as melodramatic in their angst and gloom as Sherlock. Usually at least one bitter fight would break out during the recovery phase of any health-related catastrophe, as the healthy one reached the end of his patience long before the unhealthy one reached the limit of his sense of injured entitlement. Teacups had been thrown, on occasion—tantrums had definitely been thrown.

They got into fights over who was the more daring lover. Mycroft in truth tended to prefer the quiet, conservative, comforting patterns they evolved over time—tender, patient, with Lestrade often in the lead, Mycroft reveling in the sense of being loved and pampered and cared for. Lestrade liked to mix things up a bit, stretch the limits, change the patterns around. But in truth, of the two Mycroft was the one who would push the envelope far, far beyond their ordinary comfort zones once he got into that head space. Mycroft in a wild mood put even Sherlock to shame, and left Lestrade breathless and terrified that someday they’d end up arrested—or dead. Only the certainty that Mycroft would never put them at anything he considered real risk made it possible for Lestrade to follow him into the rare round of what he referred to as Extreme Sports, when the chance of discovery or danger seemed a mere breath away.

Mycroft later would insist that it was largely illusion—but the illusion was never entirely without teeth. When challenged on that fact, Mycroft would dimple, eyes sparkling, and shrug. “Of course it’s not completely safe. Where’s the fun in that?”

Lestrade had experienced love in free-fall…

But, then, he often felt that he’d been in free-fall since the first time Mycroft had met his eyes on a late night, when the silence had risen up between them and the desire had flared and sparked and set the night on fire.

They lived together, though each appeared to have his own proprietary addresses. They had separate phones. They appeared to live separate lives, unless you knew what to watch. Even Sherlock didn’t know. The art, in the end, was to have one home located in installments, in different buildings. Mycroft’s rooms on Pall Mall; Lestrade’s place; the rooms at the Diogenes; the country house in Surrey; the safe houses Mycroft kept as Sherlock kept his bolt holes…all served as one floating, unending home. If they didn’t sleep together every night, they slept together most nights. Without that commitment, Mycroft pointed out, their schedules would never mesh. By determining that no matter what, their bed was shared, they ensured that their partnership meant more than sex on the run and text messages at a distance. It involved a bit of fancy footwork and subterfuge. But, then, that was professional necessity in any case, after all.

Lestrade watched his football in the pub on weekends and played footie with his amateur team, and no one ever realized he went home to Mycroft after. Mycroft attended the symphony and ballet and sipped wine at society affairs, and no one ever considered that at night he went home to his beloved “bit of rough.”

They did not marry, even when they legally could: it would have left a paper trail a mile wide. Both, though, wrote wills reflecting the fact that “marriage” is as much a private construct as a public one. Barring minor bequests, each left his estate, in full, to the other.

Neither was a poetic man. Neither particularly given to expressive utterances. Mycroft was dry and sardonic, and though his sentiment slipped out, it was almost always accompanied by ironic commentary and biting wit. Lestrade was gruff and bashful—quick to hug in private, but slow to say more than, “Aye, yeah, we’re a right pair, we are.” His eyes were the tell—they shone when he said it, and he’d duck his head to hide the unquenchable affection.

It ended in death, as these things must if they survive everything else. Lestrade died first. Mycroft attended the funeral. No one, not even Sherlock, knew he stood as a widower at his love’s grave. All Sherlock noticed was his brother was, if anything, more dour and cold than ever.

He failed to recognize that, from that day on, his brother became only more silent, more solitary, and more chill. They got along poorly, but there was a loyalty there that never left, nor could leave.

Mycroft lived alone, still in too many houses. He owned too many memories. At night he’d touch the strings of Lestrade’s guitar and wonder why he’d too seldom asked his lover to play. After Lestrade’s death, it stopped being so obvious that there had always been more important things to share than guitar music. That was because the guitar survived, a silent reproach, while Lestrade’s smiles and laughter and arms were gone, unable to argue their own primacy anymore.

Sherlock knew none of this.

Only when his brother died did he learn, and then only when he accepted his role as executor of the estate. Then he found the evidence hidden so many years…the notes saved. The few snapshots. Lestrade’s clothes still in the closets, still smelling of cigarettes and beer.

Sherlock did as Mycroft’s will asked. No second headstone to give away secrets. Instead clean, clean ash, scattered over the London they’d shared, and over Lestrade’s own grave. The wind blew hard, the day Sherlock spread the ashes. They spun away, along with street dust and leaves and scraps of paper, and then both men were, somehow, gone, as silent and secret as when they’d lived.

Sherlock considered creating a memorial of some sort—and decided against it. Who they had been existed still, in the past, safe and eternal and unchanging. Who they had become—what they had become—was the universe, and what better memorial could two such great men ask for?

He told the bees, though. The bees just hummed and carried on as always.


End file.
